Awesome Edie Fake Banner

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Close observers will have noticed that we’ve got a new banner up on top of the hood. It was designed by the incomparable Edie Fake, one of my absolute favorite artists and designers. To see more of Edie’s art, you can go to his website here.

You can get a better gander at the banner by clicking on the image below (sorry it takes you to photoshop; we seem to be having a little trouble with image hosting here today.)

And here’s one of Edie’s abandoned drafts; the fade is interesting, but we both agreed it was better without.

For more on Edie, you can read my essay about his mini-comic Gaylord Phoenix. Or you can check out his contribution to the Gay Utopia. Or…go visit his website already!

Old Wine in New Wineskins: An Analysis of Streak of Chalk

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The following article on Miguelanxo Prado’s Streak of Chalk was written about 15 years ago soon after the release of  its English translation. It has never been published and I assumed the manuscript had been lost up till a few months back when I discovered it in a stack of old ring folders.

While Prado is probably best known in the U.S. for his work on Sandman: Endless Nights, this was the book which brought him to the attention of Europe and to a lesser extent the American comics cognoscenti. The mid-90s was a relatively fallow period for European comics in translation. They were certainly being released, but in such numbers that Prado’s book seemed like an oasis (this being no testament as to the actual quality of the water). This situation hasn’t changed significantly in the intervening years with a mere trickle of translated works emerging from that side of the Atlantic. A large number of important comics of European origin have never been translated or are long out of print. There simply isn’t a market for them much less any related critical writing.

In the article that follows, I’ve focused largely on the symbols and allegories found in Streak of Chalk but there are a few other elements that bear looking into: the dualism and unity of the two female protagonists; the recursive imagery; and the metatextual elements.

Streak of Chalk won the prize for Best Foreign Comic at Angoulême in 1994.

Continue reading →

Girls are welcome too … if they have money

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Fact 1: there are women working in the comics industry!

Fact 2: no matter how successful these women are, Marvel will always refer to them as girls.

Girl Comics #1 (of 3)

Girl Comics is the latest anthology mini-series published by Marvel. The last one, Strange Tales, was a collection of short stories produced by independent creators and featuring Marvel characters. This time around, the gimmick is that everyone (writer, artist, letterer, and editor) involved in the comic’s production is a woman. At first glance, this seems to be a clever move indicating that Marvel is no longer a (fan) boy’s club. Though I can’t resist noting that the bosses of all these women, including the editor-in-chief and the publisher, are men. And I’m not sure assigning all these women to a niche market anthology series qualifies as a great step forward in gender equality. But everyone starts with baby steps. Maybe in a few more years, Marvel will let a girl write X-Men.

I’d also point out that Girl Comics is part of a broader effort by Marvel to attract female readers. 2010 is supposed to be the year of Marvel Women (they have their own calendar), and several new female-focused series are debuting over the next few months, such as Heralds, Black Widow, and the horrendously named Her-oes. What are potential female readers supposed to make of all this? Honestly, I’m not sure. If they’re not already Marvel fans, I doubt women are going to start flocking to comic shops to buy Girl Comics just because it has half a dozen female pencilers. And they’re definitely not going to buy Her-oes, regardless of how loudly Marvel hypes its C-list heroines.

But I’ll stop being such a downer, because the content in Girl Comics is halfway decent. In my review of Strange Tales, I complained that the shortness of each tale (about 4 pages max) left little room for storytelling. As a result, most the entries were just one-note joke strips ranging from awful to mildly amusing. The average length of a story in Girl Comics is about 7 pages, which doesn’t sound like a huge increase, but it actually does make a difference. The stories are still brief, but they contain actual plots. In between the main stories there are shorter gag strips as in Strange Tales, as well as double-page biographies of women who’ve worked for Marvel over the years (including Stan Lee’s secretary!).

As with most anthologies, the quality of  each story varies. Easily the best of the bunch is “Clockwork Nightmare,” by Robin Furth and Agnes Garbowska. The story is an homage to both “Alice in Wonderland” and “Hansel and Gretel,” with Franklin and Valeria Richards (the children of Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman) in the roles of the lost children. The plot is simple: Franklin and Valeria are playing with one of Mr. Fantastic’s inventions and become trapped in an alternate dimension. But it’s embellished by art that’s equal parts charming and brilliant. Garbowska toys with the basic mechanics of a comic in ways that I would never expect to see in a Marvel title. For example, when Franklin and Valeria are in the real world (that is, the superhero world) their dialogue is presented in standard word balloons, and the panel layout is thoroughly conventional.

But once the two children get sucked into the clockwork universe, the word balloons disappear and all the text, including dialogue, is presented as prose within the image itself. The clear lettering by Kristen Ferretti ensures that the text remains legible, even on pages where the script is too dense for its own good. Traditional panel layout also vanishes, and instead the story progresses vertically downward on each page, in a manner deliberately reminiscent of an illustrated children’s book.

When the children escape the clockwork universe, “reality” is restored, along with word balloons and panel gutters. The shifting between two different formal approaches highlights the breadth of the comics medium and the ease with which form can be altered to match the nature of the story.

Another great entry is the Venus story by Trina Robbins and Stephanie Buscema. For those of you who aren’t comics historians, Venus, the literal Goddess of Love, was the star of a romantic adventure comic that Marvel (or back then, Timely) published in the 1940s. Trina Robbins’ script is suitably outlandish, with Venus engaging in a wager with Hercules to prove that love can conquer all. So naturally she disguises herself as a mortal woman and gets a job at a beauty magazine but her boss only wants to produce ultra-violent fashions so she helps a model from an oppressive Middle Eastern regime find love and escape satyrs dressed as ghosts and … it’s just fantastically bizarre. Buscema’s artwork, which is influenced by commercial art and design from the 1960s, is charming in its own right, and it captures the zany, retro spirit of the plot.

Unfortunately, the other main stories in the anthology are nowhere near as entertaining. G. Willow Wilson and Ming Doyle turn in an action story featuring the X-Men’s Nightcrawler in a German cabaret. It’s an amusing concept for readers who are familiar with the character, but Wilson’s script never goes anywhere with the idea, and instead she focuses on an insubstantial fight. And while Doyle’s artwork is attractive, fight scenes are not her strong point.

Devin Grayson and Emma Rios tell a story about Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Wolverine, the premier love triangle of the X-Men. Grayson’s script has some decent ideas. It playfully explores Cyclop’s insecurity regarding Jean’s affection for Wolverine, and how that insecurity continuously ruins the psychic dream world that Cyclops and Jean could otherwise share. But the story probably won’t make much sense, or have any emotional effect, unless the reader is already familiar with the characters and their history. Plus, while Emma Rios has an appealing mainstream style, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the art.

The weakest entry was a brief Punisher story written by Valerie D’Orazio (best known for her blog, Occasional Superheroine). I would describe the plot as a mix between a typical Punisher comic and “To Catch a Predator.”

Obviously, the joke is that the Punisher is masquerading as a young girl online so he can lure sexual predators into a trap. The story is a little creepy, and seem out of place alongside the more light-hearted content in the rest of Girl Comics. But the real problem with D’Orazio’s script is that it just goes on for too long. At best, it works as a single page strip, but it’s extended for three more pages until finally lurching to the predictable conclusion. Nikki Cook’s art conveys the narrative in an clear manner, but there’s so little content to the story that there isn’t anything else for the art to do.

The main stories in Girl Comics #1 are a mixed bag, but I enjoyed a couple of them far more than I expected, and when judged together they’re superior to the stories in Strange Tales. While the creators in Strange Tales were content to throw together a few gags that mocked popular superheroes, at least some of the creators in Girl Comics were trying to produce great short stories that happened to feature Marvel characters. As I mentioned above, there are also short comedy strips between the main stories and biographies of women who worked for Marvel. The former are forgettable, the latter might be of interest to historians of the comic book industry. Overall, Girl Comics is a very uneven book, but parts of it are good enough that I’ll give the next issue a try.

Song of the Hanging Sky: vol 1

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Song of the Hanging Sky, volume 1

by Toriko Gin

Note: This review contains spoilers for the whole manga.  FYI.

This is a strange but rather interesting manga.  The story is about Jack, a doctor who was a soldier in a war, but now lives in a cabin in the snow with his trusty German Shepherd dog Gustav.  While they’re tromping around, lonely, they find an injured boy.

Since this is a manga, the boy has wings.

He’s also Native American: some vague tribe that pulls from the Plains hunting traditions but also includes some farmers.

This could all end in horrible no good very bad stereotypes and awfulness, but oddly, I rather enjoyed it.  For one thing, the Indians are drawn as normal and the doctor is portrayed as white (and different).  The othering going on isn’t the standard Indians heap big weird.

Certainly, there are aspects that are troubling.  The gun is referred to as making thunder: it might as well be the Thunder Sticks of the awful Spaghetti Westerns of my Sunday afternoon childhood.  But other parts are turned on their head.  Eventually, the doctor is adopted into the tribe (much like the Brady Bunch episode, actually) but, instead of getting a dopey Indian name, it turns out the doctor is now the son of the boy he helped.  That’s right, the little boy is now his father.  Unlike a more traditional Western, both the Indians and the doctor seem to suffer PTSD from the wars they’ve been in.  Again, unlike the traditional Westerns, this is not set in a Wild West of the 1800s.  A plane with parachuters appears eventually.

Now we get to a nifty part of the manga that I enjoyed, but that slammed quite unfortunately into a nasty technical translation problem: The names of the tribe members are indicative of what they do or like, names like Bear or Wolf, as per usual.  But, most unfortunately, the manga lettering does not indicate that these are names.  A figure sitting in darkness with wings unfurled, another character says, ” CAVE …?”  Would you guess that’s the guy’s name?  I didn’t.  Nor did I figure out that Cave was the chief until much later.  “HOW IS NUTS?” was another howler.

Nuts Peck turned out to be the name of the little boy.  Until his contact with the human.  Then the human changed the boy’s soul and destiny and Nuts Peck became “Hello”.  Which is great!  It really made for an interesting philosophical change, but do you have any idea how baffling it is to run through people saying Hello with no indication if it’s the name or the regular meaning?  And then there’s the fact that the bird people speak one language (bird songs and noises), the doctor speaks his own language (which is where Hello comes from, I think), and then there’s the local language of the humans–which the doctor speaks and which the birdmen shaman speaks.  Baffling.  Baffling I tell you.

In any case.  The story has its stock components, but it also has its charm.  I’m easily charmed by plucky German Shepherds, but still.  There’s good stuff here.  Introspection, the meaning of communication, destiny, magic, and the line between childhood and adulthood in various ways and who leads whom.  The art is quite beautiful.  Lots of lovely line work, great contrast, and an interesting style.

If You Don’t Know, I Can’t Tell You

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I’ve been flipping through Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester’s Comics Studies Reader, and have been struck again by how much energy folks spend in trying to define comics, and at how pointless such efforts seem. In this volume, R.C. Harvey’s essay “How Comics Came to Be” is devoted to arguing that the heart of comics is the “‘blending’ [of] verbal and visual content”, and that therefore, contra Scott McCloud, editorial cartoons are too comics (though Owly is not). On the other hand, Thierry Groensteen argues in “The Impossible Definition” that defining comics is impossible — and then he goes on to state that “The necessary, if not sufficient, condition required to speak of comics is that the images will be multiple and correlated in some fashion,” — which puts us back in McCloud territory, with editorial cartoons out and Owly and Egyptian hieroglyphs in.

Neither Groensteen nor Harvey are especially militant about their positions; I’m sure Harvey would grant Owly its comicness (claiming its the exception that proves the rule) while Groensteen specifically states that he wants to “spare my reflections from any normative character.” Such Catholicism is certainly admirable, but it does raise the question: if you’re basically willing to admit that your definition is incoherent, why bother offering it in the first place?

As it happens, I have a fairly iron-clad definition of comics, which I offer with no diffidence. If you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong.

That definition is:

“Comics are those things which are accepted as comics.”

This definition has the virtue of including both Owly and editorial cartoons, excluding Egyptian hieroglyphs, and more or less ushering in things like photonovels and perhaps abstract comics. In fact, it fits perfectly the world of comics as we actually tend to define and experience it — and it has the added benefit of being both intuitive and perfectly understandable to all.

The main objection to my definition, of course, is that it’s tautological. But the thing is…the construction of aesthetic mediums as formal structures is tautological. How do you define poetry, for example? Rhyme? Rhythm? Short? Heightened language? You can find not one, not two, but numerous exceptions to all of these general rules of thumb.

Because, you know, aesthetics isn’t math. It’s not a deductive or even an inductive process. It’s a social and historical construction. And when I say “historical” I don’t just mean looking to origins and saying, “well, you can see how editorial cartoons developed so that they relied on both words and pictures blended, so blending is important to the form,” which is more or less what R.C. Harvey does in his article. Rather, I mean that we understand what comics are through a whole slew of markers, including style, history, individual creators, distribution methods, format, and on and on. If Dave Sim writes a work of prose, puts it in a pamphlet, and distributes it through the direct market, it can make sense to think of that as a comic; if Mo Willems uses a cartoony style and word balloons and sells it as a children’s book, it can make sense to think of that as a comic too. Egyptian hieroglyphs are simply not an important influence on most (any?) comics creators — suggesting that they are part of comics history therefore seems willfully obtuse. Ukiyo-e prints, on the other hand, have a significant influence on various manga-ka; it therefore makes sense to think of them as proto-comics, even though they don’t normally utilize sequence or blend words and images in the way that R.C. Harvey suggests that gag cartoons do.

The issue here isn’t, as Groensteen argues, that each comic “only actualizes certain potentialities of the medium” — rather the issue is that the “medium” that Groensteen writes about doesn’t exist as a static or formal structure at all. Comics — like literature, or art — is what people say it is. To define it is to try to reduce it to the whim of a single person — to replace a messy consensus with a cleaner, more unitary dictat.

Doing that is both futile and silly — but perhaps necessary for tactical reasons. Terry Eagleton in his “Introduction to Literary Theory” notes that literature professors were long at pains to define literature clearly not because such a definition was in any way tenable, but simply because it was hard to get your colleagues to take you seriously if you didn’t have a concrete object that you could say you were studying. Despite some advances, comics scholars are still definitively second-class academic citizens, most of whom tend to be moonlighting post-tenure from the English department. The effort to firm up this thing called comics is, therefore, no doubt helpful in the ongoing effort to secure funding and/or some modicum of respect for those in the academy — and presumably for those outside it as well (I don’t actually know whether Harvey or Groensteen have any university connections.)

It’s actually fine with me if folks with an institutional or personal stake in comics try to shore up thier positions; people have to earn a living, and nattering on about the elements which characterize comics hardly seems like even a venial sin. But I think it’s worth pointing out that, whatever its strategic benefits, the whole “how do you formally define comics?” debate is, from any other perspective, almost completely irrelevant.

Update: Slightly edited….

Utilitarian Review 3/20/10

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On HU

This week we finished up our copyright roundtable.

Richard Cook reviewed Nola, a piece of Katrinasploitation.

Suat compared Hal Foster’s work on Tarzan and Prince Valiant.

I published an interview with Best Music Writing series editor Daphne Carr.

And this week’s download features lots of metal.

Utilitarians Everywhere

Suat is over at Robot 6 discussing what he read last week.

And I review High on Fire’s latest over at Splice Today.

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs: Virgins Are Buried Wearing a Wedding Dress

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Doom metal, black metal, a little death metal, and some tuba metal.

I don’t know what the Japanese is. Maybe Bill can help? (Don’t know that he reads these posts, but it’s worth a shot.)

1. Dwarr — Lonely Space Traveler (Animals)
2. The Skaden —?????????? (You’ll Hope I Died)
3. Eikenskaden —Virgins Are Buried Wearing a Wedding Dress (665.999)
4. Thergothon — Elemental (Stream From the Heavens)
5. Ludicra — Time Wounds All Heels (Another Great Love Song)
6. Ludicra — Clean White Void (The Tenant)
7. Acrostichon — Engraved in Black (Engraved in Black)
8. 1349 — Uncreation (Revelations of the Black Flame)
9. 1349 — Nathicana (Hellfire)
10. Arriver — The Darkest Corner of the Continent (Simon Mann EP)
11. Bellows — Haunt (Bellows)

Download Virgins Are Buried Wearing a Wedding Dress.